The R.N.C. Trump Protests So Far: Nudes, Small Hands, and Geraldo!

Officially, the protests of the Republican National Convention kicked off early Sunday morning, when the photographer Spencer Tunick—who has come to fairly dominate the field of mass nude photography—staged a shot near the Quicken Loans Arena in which 130, beautiful naked women held mirrors as they posed for him. The meaning of this project, entitled “Everything She Says Means Everything,” could not have been less clear.

On Monday, the major left-wing protest offered a considerably bigger tent. The so-called “March on the R.N.C.” welcomed socialists, police-violence protesters, those in favor of free college tuition, and those who condemned Donald Trump’scomments about Muslims and Mexicans. A group of five students from Penn State moved among the crowd, conducting a study on what it is that brings people out to protest. Cleveland native Terry Kaye held aloft an inflatable love doll on a stick with a Trump wig and a sign that read “Little Hands/Small Mind = Big Asshole.”

Like the other protesters, Kaye had gathered at one of Cleveland’s many public malls a few blocks from the convention center. “I can’t possibly list everything that’s wrong with Donald Trump in a few minutes,” said an older speaker in a reflective vest, as things kicked off. (Everyone in the crowd of about 200 had much to say. Luckily, for most of the assemblage, the press to protester ratio was about 1:1.) Tom Moore of Massachusetts, 24, stood at the corner of the square holding a cardboard sign that read “Grand Old Party/Same Old Klan.” Despite the message, and the fact that he wore a floral skirt over steel-toed boots, he seemed fairly mild mannered.

“It is my first time wearing a skirt to a protest,” he said. “It’s a bit of trade-off because airflow is great, and it is nice to show a little queer pride in the face of bigotry, but it does make running a little difficult, so we’ll see how it goes.”

RELATED VIDEO: The Best Way to Insult Donald Trump

Far on the other side of the plaza, the strains of an acoustic guitar drifted over. A man in a cowboy hat was offering his dissent from the dissent with a number of original—very original—songs in favor of Donald Trump. As a musician he was very talented.

Back at the rally, in the main part of the plaza, Scott Rupert, a 52-year-old truck driver from Mechanicsville tried to sway two black protesters to support his bid for Ohio’s hotly contested Senate seat. The men held signs that said “Abolish Capitalism! Black Lives Matter!” Rupert’s whole platform was that left and right really weren’t that far from each other when they weren’t entrenched in the politics of the day.

“After all,” he said, “Karl Marx himself said Communism can’t work without capitalism.”

“He definitely didn’t say that,” I said.

“Yeah, this is is where I’m like click,” said one of the protesters, making a hanging up the phone gesture.

Then in walked Geraldo.

Geraldo Rivera

By Dan Duray.

Flanked by two body men, the TV personality strode down the plaza, his gaze constantly shifting between the sun and the speakers at the top of the park. Geraldo Rivera, if he has ever looked unsure of himself, never looked more confident at that moment. “Can we start there,” he asked his Fox News cameraman, “and go down?”

It was inspired. The shot took viewers from the top of an Art Deco statue in the center of the park down to Rivera, crouched, with the protesters and speakers behind him. A bullhorn drowned much of what he said, but the patter was along the lines of, “They are condemning racism, they are promoting the values of a Bernie Sanders kind of socialism. . . . a bold political point of view . . . so far, thankfully, peaceful.”

Despite his employer, Rivera has been critical of Trump throughout this election cycle. After he finished his stand-up, a Canadian television team wanted to interview him. He obliged.

“My experience, and I have been to an awful lot of these, is that as the week wears on, as darkness falls,” he said, “we have the players who have a different agenda. And I have no doubt that there are some people here in this crowd of overwhelmingly law-abiding people there are some troublemakers.”

“You ought to be ashamed,” a protester said to Rivera after the interview. “For selling out on the Young Lords the way you did.” (As a young attorney Rivera had represented a Puerto Rican nationalist group by that name.)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“You should be ashamed of yourself for selling out the Puerto Rican people the way you have,” she said. “Bandito!”

A man gave him some gum that had been branded as fake medicine “Islamophobin.” Rivera seemed tired. By the time I asked if his anti-Trump stance made it hard to get along sometimes with his Fox News co-workers, it seemed hard for him to laugh loudly.